04 Hsiao-Wei Kuan The

The Law on Domestic Violence and Its Practice in Taiwan by Hsiaowei Kuan* Abstract: Taiwan enacted the Domestic Violence Prevention Act (hereinafter DVP Act) in June 1998 and became the first country in Asia to give comprehensive legal protection to battle and prevent domestic violence. As the first Asian country to enact a special law to provide substantive and procedural protection to combat domestic violence, Taiwan’s experience of implementation of the DVP Act is precious for concerned observers. This paper reviews the history of the enactment of the DVP Act as well as the debate during the process of its revi- sions. It also discusses the various measures established by the DVP Act and the most recent development of legal reform. The DVP Act in Taiwan has created preventive, protective and remedial measures for victims, in addition to the punishment and treatment of perpetrators. After twenty years of legal implementation, the ideology embedded in traditional Chinese cul- ture, which regards domestic matters as private business and shall be excluded from public scrutiny, has gradually been transformed. In conclusion, this paper argues that the next en- deavor shall address the underlying causes of gender-based violence against women. Com- prehensive preventive measures shall be adopted, which shall include but not be limited to the improvement of women’s inequality in the family and in the workplace, awareness-raising programs that promote an understanding of domestic violence as unacceptable and harmful, as well as the adoption of effective measures to encourage media to eliminate harmful and stereotypical portrayal of women. * Dr. Hsiaowei Kuan is an associate professor of law and the Director of the Center for Fundamental Legal Studies at the College of Law, National Taipei University, Taiwan. She received her S.J.D from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. Her writing focuses on gender and law, legal mobili- zation, women’s rights and LGBT rights in Taiwan. She co-edited a textbook on Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (with Wen-Chen Chang, 2015). Since November 2020, she has become a member of the Gender Equality Committee, which is an adminis- trative organ in charge of the decision-making on the national policies related to gender equality. She also served on the board of the NGOs which is dedicated to advocate for women’s rights and LGBTI rights. © DEP ISSN 1824 - 4483 Hsiaowei Kuan DEP n. 45 / 2021 Introduction Taiwan enacted the Domestic Violence Prevention Act (hereinafter as DVP Act) in June of 1998 and became the first country in Asia to give comprehensive legal protection to battle and prevent domestic violence (Chen 2010: 187; Lin 2018: 1591). Similar to other cultures in the world, the patriarchal Chinese tradition used to deem violence in the family as a family matter and was excluded from the state’s scrutiny and intervention. Before the enactment of DVP Act, the laws gave victims of domestic violence access to legal remedies aftermath in a civil suit, filed for a divorce, or filed assault complaints pursuant to the criminal procedure. How- ever, the enforcement of such law was hamstrung by the traditional ideology of “family domain shall be free from the legal intervention (法不入家門)” and “even an upright official finds it hard to settle a family quarrel (清官難斷家務事)” (Chen 2013: 45). The family was for hundreds of years a law-free zone in Taiwan, which left victims of domestic violence helpless and powerless. Two tragic incidents in the 1990s had finally raised public awareness of the need to establish a legal mechanism to protect women against domestic violence. The first incident took place in 1993, when a battered woman, Ju-wen Deng, hammered, and stabbed her husband during his sleep. Deng was raped multiple times in her teens by her neighbor, A-chi Lin, who also raped her mother ten years earlier. Lin threatened to kill Deng and the members of her family in order to keep her a sexual captive. She fled several times but Lin forced her to go back to him by beating her parents. Law enforcement chose to look away; friends considered this as a lovers’ quarrel and encouraged Deng to marry Lin to settle it. The beating did not stop after they got married. Lin even tried to kill his two sons by putting one of them on the top of the van while driving and pressing the head of the other into the washing machine. Lin also attempted to rape Deng’s two younger sisters and tried to hurt her brother by acid attack. On October 27, 1993, Deng hammered Lin’s head while he was in deep sleep and stabbed him 15 times all over his body. The death of Lin became known to the public after she turned herself in the next morn- ing (Kao 2007: 161-162). The women’s activists were shocked by the news and organized a group of female lawyers to represent her in the trials. The lawyers helped Deng successfully get her sentence reduced to the imprisonment of three years in the appellate court. The second incident was the death of Wan-Ju Peng, a women’s rights activist who worked as the head of the Department of Women’s Affairs in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) (Chang & Wu 2016: 153). She was passionate about putting a 1/4 quota mandate in the nomination rules of DPP and busy at lobbying the party representatives before the national convention was convened. On December 3, 1996, she was found dead four days after she left a hotel at midnight where she lobbied other DPP members to vote for her proposal. She was brutally murdered allegedly by a taxi driver who was to this date never found. Women’s activists were furious by her tragic death and hold a memorial parade called “fireflies at night” demanding the government to take action to combat various forms of violence against women. The two incidents finally made the issue of women’s personal safety a priority on the political agenda. The women’s 25 Hsiaowei Kuan DEP n. 45 / 2021 groups in Taiwan therefore vowed to enact laws to protect women from various forms of violence based on sex, which include sexual assault, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. These laws were enacted consecutively and are currently called “three laws on prevention of violence against women” (防暴三法, hereinafter as” 3 laws on PVAW”). The Enactment and Revision of the Domestic Violence Prevention Law It was under such a political atmosphere that the DVP Act was drafted and enacted. Inspired by Deng’s incident, in 1994 the Awakening Foundation began to research the relevant laws in other jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and the United States as references for Taiwan’s DVP Act. In 1996, the task of drafting was taken over by the Modern’s Women’s Foundation (MWF). A drafting committee comprised of 40 judges, battered women’s advocates, at- torneys, and other professionals was formed after the members of the MWF visited San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle to understand how the DVP laws mechanism were designed and enforced in the United States. The drafting committee decided to take the “Model Code on Domestic and Family Violence”, which was published in 1994 by the National Council of Juve- nile and Family Court Judges in the United States as its fundamental model (Kao 2007: 63-64). The drafting work was based on a draft written by a female judge, the Honorable Feng-Hsian Kao, and also considered relevant laws in Australia and New Zealand. The committee was then divided into task force groups which were responsible respectively for four different subjects: civil liability, penal punishment, domestic affairs, and prevention services. These four parts later became the major parts of the DVP Act. The drafting committee hold over 20 meetings and three public meetings before it published its final draft in September 1997. The draft was finally passed in May 1998 after months of partisan negotiations (Kao 2007: 64). The 1998 DVP Act was a political compromise, the implementation of which was unsatisfactory for the battered women’s advocates. A coalition, “Coalition of Revision of DVP Act”, was therefore established in January 2001 to perfect the DVP Act. It was formed by a few women’s rights groups aimed at revising the 1998 DVP Act (Kao 2007: 64-65). The draft of the new law was finished and sub- mitted to the parliament in 2003. In August 2004, yet another broadened coalition was formed, “Coalition of Lobbying the 3 Laws on PVAW”, the name of which was later changed as “Coalition of PVAW”, to facilitate the work of parliamentary lobbying. The revision was successfully passed in March 2007, six years after its revision initiative action. In the following years, the DVP Act had undergone several revi- sions to improve the scheme or measures which would be more closely tailored to Taiwan’s circumstances (Chen 2010: 191). 26 Hsiaowei Kuan DEP n. 45 / 2021 Taiwan’s Domestic Violence Prevention Measures The Scope of Family Members It is renowned that Taiwan’s DVP Act not only protects heterosexual couples but also includes same-sex couples as protected subjects as early as in 2007, twelve years before same-sex marriage was legalized. Since domestic violence was defined by law as violence against “family members”, it is crucial to identify the scope of the family members in law. Article 3 of the DVP Act stipulates that family member defined in this Act includes the following members and their minors: (1) spouse or former spouse; (2) persons with an existing or former cohabitation relationship, a relationship between a householder and household members or a relationship between household members;(3) persons with an existing or former relationship between lineal relative by blood or lineal relative by marriage; or (4) persons with an existing or former relationship between collateral relative by blood or collateral relative by marriage within four degrees of kinship.

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